English literature is full of eulogistic mention of Pope.  Thackeray is one of the last great authors who has spoken golden words about the poet.  “Let us always take into account,” he says, “that constant tenderness and fidelity of affection which pervaded and sanctified his life.”

What pluck and dauntless courage possessed the “gallant little cripple” of Twickenham!  When all the dunces of England were aiming their poisonous barbs at him, he said, “I had rather die at once, than live in fear of those rascals.”  A vast deal that has been written about him is untrue.  No author has been more elaborately slandered on principle, or more studiously abused through envy.  Smarting dullards went about for years, with an ever-ready microscope, hunting for flaws in his character that might be injuriously exposed; but to-day his defamers are in bad repute.  Excellence in a fellow-mortal is to many men worse than death; and great suffering fell upon a host of mediocre writers when Pope uplifted his sceptre and sat supreme above them all.

Pope’s latest champion is John Ruskin.  Open his Lectures on Art, recently delivered before the University of Oxford, and read passage number seventy.  Let us read it together, as we sit here in the presence of the sensitive poet.

“I want you to think over the relation of expression to character in two great masters of the absolute art of language, Virgil and Pope.  You are perhaps surprised at the last named; and indeed you have in English much higher grasp and melody of language from more passionate minds, but you have nothing else, in its range, so perfect.  I name, therefore, these two men, because they are the two most accomplished artists, merely as such, whom I know, in literature; and because I think you will be afterwards interested in investigating how the infinite grace in the words of the one, the severity in those of the other, and the precision in those of both, arise wholly out of the moral elements of their minds,—­out of the deep tenderness in Virgil which enabled him to write the stories of Nisus and Lausus, and the serene and just benevolence which placed Pope, in his theology, two centuries in advance of his time, and enabled him to sum the law of noble life in two lines which, so far as I know, are the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words:—­

    ’Never elated, while one man’s oppressed;
    Never dejected, while another’s blessed.’

I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and to make yourselves entirely masters of his system of ethics; because, putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world’s than ours, I hold Pope to be the most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind; and I think the Dunciad is the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work ‘exacted’ in our country.  You will find, as you study Pope, that he has expressed